“When did you hear any public figure extol cheap energy as an agent of poverty alleviation? When did you hear any historian describe how coal, and later oil, liberated the mass of humanity from back-breaking drudgery and led to the elimination of slavery? For 10,000 years, the primary source of energy was human muscle-power, and emperors on every continent found ways to harness and exploit their fellows. But why bother with slaves when you can use a barrel of sticky black stuff to do the work of a hundred men – and without needing to be fed or housed? The reason no one says these things (other than Matt Ridley) is to be blunt, that it is unfashionable. The high-status view is that we are brutalising Gaia, that politicians are in hock to Big Oil, and that we all ought to learn to get by with less – a view that is especially easy to take if you spend the lockdown being paid to stay in your garden, and have no desire to go back to commuting.”
I remember reading TS Ashton’s book on the Industrial Revolution many years ago as an undergraduate, and it was emphatic that no serious civilisation lifts out of poverty without an Industrial Revolution. Even Karl Marx, wrong as he was on so much around economics, gave grudging respect to the IR in his Communist Manifesto. (Old Soviet propaganda posters would show pictures of rosy-cheeked workers in front of factories belching out smoke.)
No politician has explained why Net Zero has to be done by 2030 other than muttering ‘climate crisis’ which seems to be a big lie that they all utter. Or why China/India get a free pass until 2050 and can build as many coal stations as they want. When do the serious protests against Net Zero start?
Ayn RAND described it perfectly. Socialism has so abyssimal failures that nobody can support it anymore . With ecology, it is the goal. Famine and poverty are the aim.
“The hatred of the good for being the good ” They want us destroyed, hungry and humble. So they could rule us in their insanity.
Why ? Because they are intellectuals who know they are complete failures.
They are worse than fascists or communists.
When the lights go out. Just like 1974.
In support of Matt Ridley, the link provided by Dan Hannan goes to Amazon USA. Which might be the wrong direction for a British author and a British audience.
Amazon UK version:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Matt-Ridley/e/B000AQ6M5Q
Anyway, recommended reading.
Now then, how do we buy shares in his family’s coal mine?
Hmmm. Press “X” to Doubt.
The BBC have been running trailers for a programme called something like ‘Big Oil versus the World’. Our problem seems to be that great swathes of the population just have no idea how all the stuff that supports their cushy lifestyle is made and distributed. They have no idea what the consequences of Net Zero will actually be in reality, and seem determined to support it until that reality hits them in the face like a house brick.
As I say, when they’re shivering around a candle like some Dickensian Christmas card theme, with neither gas to warm them nor electricity for light or heat, then and only then will the consequences of NetZero (Marxism) come home to them.
The bigger question is what will they do after that?
My mother was raised in the country. Her and her mother collected fallen wood to burn. That’s illegal now.
Stoneground, I wonder how many people have any idea of how many things, such as plastics, artificial fibres, paints, lubricants, etc, come from oil and the processes involved?
What I worry is that the education system in much of the world simply doesn’t prepare the public to grasp any of this. Our culture doesn’t appear to encourage curiosity.
What’s needed are ideas on how to change this. Suggestions welcome!
@Johnathan Pearce
I sympathise with your point of view, as most of us in the UK & USA are now living with an education system that has dumbed-down the crucial STEM subjects i.e. Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. Science of course means the proper sciences (Biology, Chemistry, Physics). Some might say that’s just in response to “market forces” and the lack of demand for STEM-qualified young people, as most of our old heavy industry has collapsed.
Other countries, of course, haven’t given up on STEM. I saw a brand-new MG car on my local High Street just yesterday. I was, for a moment, confused. Didn’t MG go bust a few years ago. Ah (light bulb moment), this must be one of the new Chinese MGs, built after they bought the remains of MG and moved it lock, stock and two smoking exhausts from the Midlands to China.
How the Chinese must be laughing at these pathetic Westerners. They don’t even want to try and compete any more, and it’s so easy to grab their technology. e.g. Manchester Uni and graphene.
Move to India? That’s one of the countries now receiving more Russian oil and gas. Along with producing more of their own coal. And the technology transfer (like TATA owning Jaguar Land Rover).
Meanwhile, some folks are confused by Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan …
Nobody seems to believe that the US will protect Taiwan from China (as a nation state). What Pelosi (and her backers) would be willing to protect is Taiwan’s semiconductor industry. Otherwise Apple (et al) goes down the pan big-time.
Nice little industry you’ve got there, would be a shame if you and and your families end-up in some Chinese labour camp (nudge nudge). Do you fancy moving the senior people to California? Just in case the Chinese do invade. We can move the fabrication plants (or just rebuild them) somewhere like Singapore or India.
John Galt, Ridley’s tenure at Northern Rock doesn’t mean his views on science and energy are mistaken. And that’s assuming he was responsible for the NR collapse, which I doubt. I covered that episode.
Play the ball, not the man.
My understanding (possibly wrong) is that Marx inherited from Hegel the Aristotelian notion of the inevitability of Progress.
Wasn’t Marx the first writer to introduce the concept of “Industrial Revolution”?
Karl Marx wasn’t being worked to an early death in a Manchester factory.
His enthusiasm for industrial revolutions might have waned if he or any of his family had been subjected to such economic brutalism.
The fortunate always have general theories about how society should advance but it always involves hardship for others, never themselves.
The Greens are the latest manifestation of this phenomenon.
Well, as the banner in one of the photos (the second one down) in Samizdata’s report of last year’s anti-lockdown protests put it, ‘YOU Are The Carbon They Want To Reduce.’
As to ‘STEM’ focused education, some may have noticed that there appears to be a concerted effort to turn STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) into STEAM with the addition of Arts. Will it devalue the whole concept, we may well wonder?….
Questioner: “So, how did you all get your first-class degrees, may I ask?”
Science graduate: “I developed a promising new technique to combat pancreatic cancer by stimulating the Islets of Langerhans to increase hormone production.”
Engineering graduate: “I designed a 600m-high viaduct to carry a six-lane motorway across a 2km-wide valley using 15% less metal in the structure than any previous design.”
Arts graduate: “I glued four tampons to a seaside-gift-shop print of three kittens in a basket and called it ‘Searing Critique Of Consumer Capitalism #17.”
One of the reasons the countryside emptied out during Industrial Revolution was that as shitty & grim as Victorian factories were, and how squalid cities where, rural life was even worse & certainly more precarious. Hard for us to imagine.
Pete, Bulldog Drummond has already given what I think is a strong response, but I’d add that the long hours and drudgery of working in a factory was still better than no work at all, and further, that as returns to capital increased and more goods and services got made, so did real wages, and over time, workers began to put together friendly societies, savings schemes, and the rest. Pre-industrial civilisation was fine for a small sliver of aristocrats and a few merchants. For everyone else, you were a good harvest away from mass starvation. In the early days of the IR, it was fashionable for “romantic” writers and artists, such as Wordsworth, Southey and Ruskin to denounce industry as dirty and cruel, failing to understand the direction of travel.
Marx was an awful individual in many ways, and his theory of exploitation based on a dud theory of labour value that could not explain resource allocation, prices and co-ordination, and he failed to really understand entrepreneurship and risk taking as genuinely important drivers of wealth. But he did intuit that the rise of industry was a generally positive development, even if he was characteristically rude about peasants and the “idiocy of rural life”. He also grasped that with industry, it meant that a lot of women could, for the first time, start to earn money outside the home, and grasped that this would have momentous consequences.
This collection of essays, edited by FA Hayek, is also good at debunking many of the claims that capitalism immiserated people who would, in some parallel history, have lived a joyous life of rural pleasure, indolence and fun.
The United States Senate has just passed another “Climate” orgy of government spending, taxes and regulations. This will further undermine the American economy – which is already in recession.
They did this KNOWING that the People’s Republic of China will just carry on increasing C02 emissions. The PRC has even formally left the talks – they have made it absolutely obvious that they are going to carry on producing vastly more C02 than the United States (let alone the United Kingdom – which produces 1% of world C02 emissions).
This campaign in the West has nothing really to do with reducing world C02 emissions – which will carry on increasing.
This campaign in the West is about replacing the West (in manufacturing and military strength – for military strength depends, in the end, on manufacturing strength) with the People’s Republic of China Communist Party dictatorship.
“That is paranoid” – what other conclusion is consistent with the facts?
When all the facts lead to a “paranoid” conclusion – that conclusion is not paranoid.
@Pete
Karl Marx wasn’t being worked to an early death in a Manchester factory. His enthusiasm for industrial revolutions might have waned if he or any of his family had been subjected to such economic brutalism.
Sure, factory work was hard, no denying that. But not as hard and badly paid as agricultural work. Otherwise why would so many people have moved? It was true 200 years ago, and it’s still true. Agricultural work was seasonal, temporary, and at the whim of the weather (good or bad, and no pay if bad). For many, factory work was a comparative heaven (more regular work, indoors, dry and better paid).
The famous saying “From Hell, Hull and Halifax – From all these three, Good Lord, deliver us” wasn’t about life in Halifax factories, although it could have been about life expectancy in Hull’s fishing industry. Men living past 40 was considered unusual. The saying was more about Yorkshire Justice.
At Halifax, the law so sharp doth deal,
That whoso more than 13 pence doth steal;
They have a gyn that wondrous, quick and well,
Sends thieves all headless unto Heaven or Hell.
No Snorri – Aristotle did not believe that progress was inevitable. Indeed it was part of Hegel’s (concealed) attack on Aristotle that Aristotle had no real theory of change. However, Hegel’s own theory , thesis, anti thesis, synthesis – and a “stage theory” of history, is deeply problematic.
Did Karl Marx invent the idea of an industrial revolution? That seems very unlikely – as Karl Marx was born in 1818 and did not really write anything till the 1840s.
It was obvious that the mass production of factories (the developments that started in the mid 1700s) had produced a very different economic system long before the 1840s.
Although it is true that the number of industrial workers did not outnumber the number agricultural workers in England and Wales till the Census of 1851.
It was not that people were “driven off the land” (as mythology would have it) – it is that the extra people (the extra births who in previous ages have starved to death) went to work in factories and other industrial enterprises.
Ireland tried to maintain a society of peasant plot farming in spite of rising population – parts of Ireland had an agricultural and industrial revolution, but most of it did NOT.
This system of most people depending on peasant plot farming in Ireland led to utter horror in the late 1840s.
That is the sort of horror that Bulldog Drummond is pointing to – about one person in three in Ireland either died or had to leave the country.
The lack of modern farming and modern manufacturing in most of Ireland led to utter disaster. “Greens” please not.
“No, no, no – it was lack of government welfare that led to disaster in Ireland”.
Not so – as Ireland had welfare taxes from 1831 onwards, and in the late 1840s had the highest welfare (“Poor Law”) taxes on the planet. Indeed after the Act of 1846 areas of Ireland that were not bankrupt were forced to subsidise areas of Ireland that were bankrupt – so everywhere was dragged down.
Far from following “laissez faire” policies in Ireland (as the lying “history” books and television programmes claim) – London actually used Ireland as a test-bed for various statist policies.
National police force (1801), national system of state schools, welfare taxes on a national basis (with non bankrupt Poor Law Unions forced to subsidise bankrupt Poor Law Unions – thus dragging all areas down) .. all done in Ireland when it would have been very difficult to do these things in England, Scotland and Wales.
For example, why was a system of state schools created in Ireland? It was created because an English aristocrat (the future Earl of Derby – who was not even a government minister at the time) wrote a letter in 1831 suggesting it as a good idea.
Whatever one thinks of the policy – some powerful bloke writing a letter and it being carried out, with the Irish taxpayers having no say in the matter, is NOT the way policy should be made.
Shades of the United Nations and World Economic Forum making policy on “Sustainable Development Goals” (“public control of land” and all) with ordinary taxpayers (ordinary voters) having no veto.
Policy should NOT be made from above and imposed on the voters – that is not democracy.
Rudolph Hucker.
The number of people working in farming in England and Wales (the first industrial countries) went UP during the industrial revolution.
People were not really moving from farming to industry – it was the extra people (the extra births) who, in previous times would have died, who moved to the industrial towns.
The industrial revolution saved their lives.
Could wages and conditions of work been better? Yes, but NOT with state intervention. The high government spending, taxes and disruption of trade, caused by the wars of the period (first with the Americans – then decades of war with France) meant that wages were lower and conditions of work worse, than would otherwise have been the case.
Things would have been less bad if government had managed to keep its spending and taxes down (and managed to keep trade more open) – but the wars made that impossible.
Been a while since I read it for a college paper but George Boyer I believe pointed out that in his work on the historical context of the Communist Manifesto that Marx’s understanding of factory conditions was based largely on Engel’s work on Manchester.
Manchester factories were pretty diabolical for the period and the working classes there in.a bad shape.In other cities like Birmingham and London, which had about as much industrialisation but generally more still smaller factories and workshops and less ‘satanic mills’, conditions were better. Had Marx and Engels studied those areas in good faith, their understanding of industrialisation and capitalism may have been richer and more accurate.
Was agriculture forced to become more mechanised because the peasants were moving into factories? Or was the process enabled by industrialisation creating the ability to mass produce machinery? Farming is extremely industrialised now, there are massive machines to do pretty much every task. This work is often done by contractors who can presumably afford bigger machines than a single farmer would buy for his own use.
@Paul Marks
The number of people working in farming in England and Wales (the first industrial countries) went UP during the industrial revolution.
Citation required.
It might depend which phase of the industrial revolution you mean. Early phase maybe? Or maybe you’re thinking of the agricultural revolution that happened before the industrial revolution.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/did-the-british-agricultural-revolution-lead-to-the-industrial-revolution.html
Or something else?
https://www.industrialrevolutionresearch.com/industrial_revolution_agriculture.php
A couple of remarks.
First, i remember reading in The Economist, over 20 years ago, that human height went down in Britain in the early phase of the Industrial Revolution.
Assuming that i remember correctly, does that mean that the IR was a Bad Thing? In short, no.
People were moving to the cities to work in factories, not necessarily because living conditions were better in the cities: more likely, because the demand for agri.labor decreased (to produce a fixed amount of food: more agri.labor was probably needed because of an increased population — but a reduced percentage of this population could be profitably employed in the agri.sector).
Why could more food be produced with less labor?
First, because of crops from the New World, especially potatoes.
Second, because of the Anglo-Dutch Agricultural Revolution.
Mass unemployment of farmers was an undesirable, but short-term, effect of progress in agriculture.
We could also go into the Enclosures and Clearances, but i do not feel qualified to comment of that.
Good pun. 😉
@Paul Marks
The United States Senate has just passed another “Climate” orgy of government spending, taxes and regulations.
The thing that most upsets me about this is the provision for 87,000 new IRS auditors. 87,000!!! I was reminded of that section in the declaration of Independence: reasons that the colonists had decided to separate from Great Britain, including this one:
He has … sent hither Swarms of Officers to harrass our People, and eat out their Substance.
Plus ça change…. The pigs are living in the farmhouse now.
A long dead and erudite writer of science fiction, L. Sprague de Camp, (a lovely name) wrote a book called “The Ancient Engineers” wherein he postulated that the study of technical innovation correlated with advances in human success much more than the study of political history.
He was right.
Politicians drag us down more often than not, being mostly parasites.
The serious study of political history is needed to avoid having more political history and less technical innovation.
History shows us how quickly a country can return to slavery as the Germans did during their fossil fuel shortage of the first half of the 1940s.
@Tmitsss
Good point.
I think I’ve already remarked that Germany (of all European countries) should have remembered what happens when the whole country runs out of fuel.
History will also show us how quickly history can be repeated during the fossil fuel shortage of the first half of the 2020s.
@Snorri – yes, but the study of politics must be how to prevent 99% of politics.
At risk of being accused (rightly!) of self promotion, I recommend Humanity Unbound: How Fossil Fuels Saved Humanity from Nature and Nature from Humanity.
Gist follows:
Since this was written in 2010 (published in 2012), some of the figures in the foregoing need minor revision. Although fossil fuels still provides about 80% of global energy consumption, they also provide at least 62.5% of global food production including at least 48% from fossil-fuel-derived nitrogenous fertilizers, and an extra 167% of global cropland would be necessary to replace food production if we go NetZero. See: Reduction in global habitat loss from fossil-fuel-dependent increases in cropland productivity
The Industrial Revolution was based upon the use of cheap energy to substitute for low-productivity human labor, freeing them up for higher-productivity labor, which resulted in higher wages for workers. Making energy expensive reverses this process. Simply put, you can either have cheap energy and high wages, or expensive energy and low wages.
The greatest labor saving and productivity tool ever invented is a gallon of diesel fuel.
Fred Z: IIUC what you mean, i agree.
Let me tell you a story: I studied Roman history in high school in Italy, and definitely did not get any libertarian message from it. I was surprised to learn*, much later, that the works of Roman historians inspired the Roundheads to revolt against absolute monarchy.
* from the essay, A Third Concept of Liberty, by Quentin Skinner.
(And thanks to Indur Goklany for the links.)
John Galt — Matt Ridley may not have been the greatest bank executive in the world, but he has greater intellectual integrity than virtually any public intellectual dealing with innovation, technology and scientific matters. He has endured a lot of grief on global warming, yet he has not compromised his intellectual honesty. Moreover, his ideas on those matters are themselves quite ingenious, and he has a remarkable ability to synthesize those ideas for public consumption.
I would no more expect him to be a great banker than I would expect a great cricketer to be a great chairman of the board for, say, a tea company (or a banker, for that matter).
A pertinent interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o74rQmLRqtA
Bruce, pertinent indeed. Thank you for the introduction to Magatte Wade. She is very like Candace Owens in the US. Both are forcefully eloquent in their condemnation of so-called ‘progressives’, who are anything but.